A medicine cabinet is commonly provided on one of the walls in a domestic bath room to offer space for the convenient storage of personal use appliances, chemical aids and even medicines of its regular users. Common tools might include hand razors and/or power shavers, hand and/or power tooth brushes or irrigators, and hair dryers, combs and brushes; while the chemical aids catagory might include containers for powders, creams or liquids of dentifrices, lotions, deodorants, soaps, shampoos and cosmetics.
Two basic forms of medicine cabinets are commonly used: a flush mounted cabinet, and a recessed cabinet. Standard cabinet sizes further have evolved, including inside height, width and front-to-rear or depth storage spaces. While the cabinets are available in many height and width combinations, the depth storage spaces of most commercially available medicine cabinets are all about the same: at or just exceeding four inches as a minimum.
The flush mounted medicine cabinet fits against and is only on the exterior surface of the room wall. Its major appeal is that it can be easily installed without significantly altering most wall constructions, being common therefore as a remodeling project cabinet. Its major drawback includes its projection forwardly away from the wall, which including the thicknesses of the rear cabinet wall and front closure door and possible decorative door or cabinet trim, can exceed five inches. Thus, common complaints of a flush mounted cabinet, particularly a large one centered and overlying most or all of a vanity, are its massive appearance and its obstruction of the rear portions of the vanity top surface.
The recessed cabinet fits through an opening in the wall surface and into the wall interior, in a special framed box opening interrupting the vertical extent of one or more wall studs or between adjacent wall studs structurally forming the wall. The wall would typically be formed by conventional 2".times.4" wall studs, so that about three plus inches of the cabinet is fitted within the wall framing and about one plus inches of the cabinet is projected forwardly from the exterior wall surface. Commercially available recessed cabinets have been fabricated with different standard widths: one about fourteen inches wide, allowing it to be fitted between adjacent wall framing studs spaced apart on sixteen inch centers; and several other both narrower and wider than this, including a sixteen inch wide recessed cabinet widely used in many upgrade homes since the 1940's.
The small forward projection of a recessed cabinet is its major appeal; while its major drawback is the permanency of its framed box opening. Fabrication of the framed box opening does not add significantly to the overall framing cost if completed with the wall framing, while all is yet exposed. For these reasons, recessed medicine cabinets probably are the preferred choice of new construction. However, replacing an existing framed box opening with another to accommodate a recessed cabinet differing in size and/or location, will generally require expensive major wall reconstruction. Without it, the adjacent wall boards must remain and be exposed after the remodeling, and fabrication of a new box framing without distrubing these adjacent structures would require great carpentry skills and effort. In fact, the task might even be impossible should piping or conduits in the wall be in the way, and incapable of being relocated.
By contrast to the remodeling problems of a recessed cabinet, the size and location of a new vanity can be changed quite easily, as the wall boards to be hidden by the new vanity can be removed to expose and/or relocate the water or drain lines as needed, and/or new water or drain lines can be routed between the original wall connections and the newly added vanity sink while remaining hidden within the vanity. Further, a new flush mounted cabinet could merely be mounted over the original framed box, thereby hiding it without redoing it. Thus, should a limited budget and/or limited carpentry skills remain factors in a remodeling project, one might be forced to go with a new vanity sized and/or located as desired and use a flush mounted medicine cabinet to complementing the new vanity.